Facebook now has nearly 2 billion users, so you SHOULD be advertising your local business on there.
The fact of the matter is, you can pay thousands on flyering, newspaper ads, attending events, but you never truly know your return from that effort. I.E. how many people came to your local business and bought your product or service as a result of that marketing.
Facebook allows you to do just that, in fact, it takes it the next level.
With facebook we can see how much you’ve spent, how many people have engaged with that ad, how many people have clicked on it and, of course… how many people have taken your desired action, whether it be to visit your website, sign up, or purchase!
So Why Isn’t Everyone Using It?
According to a new survey of small business owners from Weebly, a DIY drag and drop web design company, 62 percent say their paid ads on Facebook are missing the target.
So in this article I’m going to go through the steps you need to take to get your first customer using Facebok advertising…
Step #1: Set Up Your Business Manager
I know it can be tempting to hit that big blue ‘boost post’ button on your Facebook Business page, but this is NOT a good strategy.
Let’s face it, Facebook wants you to spend money, so it’s going to make it as easy as possible for you to run ads.
However, using this function gives us limited targeting ability, and we want to be able to really target the people interested in our business!
Go to business.facebook.com and set up your Facebook business manager, or you can just click the drop down menu on the right hand side of your Facebook business page and click ‘manage ads’:
You may need to select the ad account you want to work on. If you have access to more than one ad account, you’ll see those in the top left corner of your screen inside Facebook ads manager:
If this is your first time using Facebook Advertising, you might need to fill out some basic information, such as payment information and currency.
Once you’ve done this, you’re ready to go!
Hit that ‘create’ button in the top left corner and let’s set up our first Facebook advert, and get some customers!
Step #2: Plant Your Pixel
I remember when i started running my first ever Facebook ads. I wasn’t using the Facebook pixel… in fact, I had no idea what it was or how it worked.
The Facebook pixel is ABSOLUTELY essential if you want to be running traffic to a website or landing page.
Think of it like your Facebook brain. It will learn over time, and inevitably improve the performance of your ads.
The pixel is used in three main ways:
- Reporting & performance measurement.
- Remarketing – Create audiences of all those who have taken certain actions on your site.
- Optimisation – Use your pixel data to optimise your campaigns.
If this is all totally new to you, that’s ok. I suggest you go and read some of our other blogs so you can get a better idea of how it works.
But for now, just get it installed.. Firstly, hit the drop down in the top left of your ad manager:
Then click the ‘All tools’ button, to expand the options:
Click on ‘Pixels’ under ‘measure and report’ to open up your pixel options.
Next up, you’ll see the following page… just click ‘create a pixel’
Name your pixel.. then next up comes the techy part.
Now you need to head over to your website and paste that pixel code into the <head> of your website.
Just click to copy, and then send that code either over to your developer, or if you have a wordpress website, just read this blog to find out how to do it. It’s super easy!
Ok, now it’s time to get going!
Step #3: Choose Your Objective
There are three tiers to a Facebook advert:
- Campaign level – Objective: what do you want your advert to achieve?
- Ad Set level – Who do you want to target? how much do you want to spend? Where do you want your ad to show up?
- Ad level – Image / Video, Caption, Headline, links…
Let’s start at campaign level, where we’ll choose ultimately, what we want our facebook promotion to do for our business.
There’s several different objectives you can use, each with their own benefits.
For this, we will stick with the Traffic objective. What this means, is that Facebook will go out and find all the people within your audience that it thinks will most likely want to visit your website. (It will use your Facebook pixel to optimise for this)
Step #4: Choose Your Audience
As this article is for local businesses, your audience is more or less decided for you.
You’ll want to be targeting people who are within a certain radius of your business. Unless you have some key targeting features, such as age, gender, etc… for example, if you’re in real estate, you may want to only target home owners, I would stick to broad targeting, until you have some data to run with.
So we’re going to going to go with everyone within 15KM who is within 18 and 55 years old, as you can see below. We have a nice sized audience of 150,000. The broader the better, as if this ad works, you’ll want to be able to scale it up and increase your budget over time!
Remember, we’re not adding any specific targeting here, but if you were, you would want to add that in here:
P.S. Keep expand interests unticked..
For this campaign, we’ll also leave placements on automatic.
Step #5: Create Your Ad
Next up, choose the page you want to represent:
You’ll need to be admin or advertiser of the page.
Then go ahead and choose the type of ad you want to use…
If i went through each and every ad we would be here all day. We’re going to stick with single image ads for this campaign. That’s just a clickable image, with a headline, and a caption.
Next up, upload your image, choose your caption, headline, and the website URL you would like to send traffic to, and you’re good to go!
Step #6: Test Your Creative
You can run multiple variations of your ad to the same audience to see which works best!
You can either do this by adding multiple images in the ad creation page… 
Or duplicate the ad in the ad manager, and create the variations you want to test. This can either be image, headline, or caption. We recommend keeping this simple.. so maybe just test the image / headline for now.
Step #7: Optimise And Scale
Right, now your ad is up and running! You should be able to see it inside your ads manager:
I suggest leaving it running for a few days to really test. Once it’s been running, come back to the ad to see how it’s done!
You can even see the exact metrics you want by clicking on ‘columns’, and then ‘customize columns’.
If you think you have an ad you think is performing well, gradually increase the budget by between 20 & 50% at a time.
Overview
Running Facebook ads is simple, however, it takes time to master them. Take the time, and don’t be put off if you don’t see results instantly!
If your ad didn’t perform the way you wanted it to, duplicate the campaign, and try again with a different message, offer, and creative!
Good luck!
